Endeavor is a game about a dwarf trying to recover an ancient secret. Or maybe it’s about exploring and collecting treasure. Or maybe it’s about collecting powerups. Or maybe it’s just about killing things.

With multiple endings, quests, interactive npcs and ambient critters, it’s shaping up to be my most involving game yet. It features multiple original musical tracks, over 8 upgrades, an improved control scheme, and several secret areas.

It’s scheduled to be done by the end of the month and will be published for free on Kongregate.

If anyone’s interested in helping me with some beta testing, send me an email at zillix7@yahoo.com

Well, first of all, I’ve been spending lots of time doing paperwork, and a few hours working on this: Olofson Consulting.

When it comes to actual game development, there have been some issues as well. Not exactly unexpected, but I’ve spent a little too much time trying to figure out how to actually use ZeeSpace for backgrounds. It is fast enough for realtime rendering, and at first, I intended to leverage that to do away with map size restrictions – that is, you’d be able to fly “forever” without wrapping or hitting some artificial limit. However, there are various problems with it, most importantly:

• You need to generate the background graphics incrementally, and unless you’re running rather low quality settings, this is expensive enough that distributing the work evenly enough across frames becomes tricky.
• To use the shadowcasting feature – which looks really nice, and is pretty much required to spot tall structures and mountain peaks – I need access to Z channel (ie height field) data way outside the area I’m actually rendering.

I have figured out various solutions, but obviously, this is pretty hairy stuff to get right, and certainly not something I can whip up in a day or two.

So, what I’m going to do for the alpha version is simply restricting the map size to some sensible size (slightly larger than the Kobo Deluxe maps, I think, as Kobo II won’t wrap) and simply pre-render the whole thing before starting the level! If you want native resolution backgrounds at 2560×1600, that’s almost a gigabyte of data – but if you can get by with 640×480, you “only” need 50 MB or so.

Obviously, there is a huge potential for compression here, for future releases. There is the obvious lowering the color depth and various graphics compression algorithms, but more interestingly, since all graphics is either generated (Perlin noise and the like) or structured (various primitives; surfaces, domes etc), there is a lot of potential for the compression algorithms taking hints from the structured data, rather than just looking at the raw pixels.

And, there is also the option of actually following the tile grid when placing map objects, to improve the chances of the compressor finding identical tiles. Chances of leveraging this can probably be improved if lighting data (shadows) is separated from the “raw” graphics, so that top-right corner of building 23 is always the same tile, regardless of whatever other tiles are casting shadows on it.

Given the nature of the graphics at this point (mostly monochrome surfaces with geometry + lighting doing most of the work), one might actually get away with trivially compressing many of the tiles to 8 bpp monochrome, with just a single RGB color per tile for “colorization”. One might even interpolate color across the surface of each tile, to support smooth chroma gradients with virtually no memory overhead.

Anyway, bed time…!

I’m quite happy right now, I’ve gotten the game to work a lot better, the spawn system is kinda working, which means one of the things I had problems with is partly solved. I’m just going to finish that tonight and then work on moving backgrounds/saving. I may update the graphics as well. I gave the game a play test earlier, I find it quite fun, if a little basic.

-bear

A while back I made a game, Hungry Hungry Castaways, for LD17. More recently, I’ve been updating it and putting a lot of polish into it. Today I announce that it is finally done and rebranded as: Blow Da Bricks! It is a fun and addicting puzzle game. I have put on MochiAds and the game is also on Kongregate. I’ll stay posted with my ad revenue, hopefully I’ll reach $1.00 by Halloween. Check it out on Kongregate. If you like it, please rate it 5 stars

Friend of mine mentioned Ludum Dare’s October contest and I blogged about it. I found the idea of completing *and selling* challenging and most interesting. I stepped in the bandwagon on 22nd day, so it’s bit over one week time for me to do the game.

I chose to put together a tactical game. It is turn-based, features hopefully interesting decisions. And there’s some zombie dwarves. Add some pixel art by me and I believe I have a great mix together.

I have managed to complete several key features (couple of dwarves, simple cutscene/dialogue system, enemy apperance, taking actions and such). There’s still much to do (handling game loop, entering new locations, spawning enemies, dwarf art and such) but I’m confident that this will be just fine.

Since the challenge is also about *selling a copy*, I decided that I would put the game on sale right away. I wrote a pre-order blog post and see if people are willing to support this. I put the price tag $1 to the game knewing that paypal will take most of it, and the tax man rest, but at least it’s what this contest was about.

Will report more later.

I ♥ my testers

Tonight, we celebrate — I’ve finished enough of Distant Star that I’m releasing a copy to my beta testers tonight. I spent most of the weekend putting the finishing touches on a *ton* of polish — the game now has attractive victory/defeat screens and a framework for tracking and reporting gameplay stats, plus a really useful report that you can access after each combat showing you how well your ships fared in battle.

“Beta test?” you ask.

But of course — my posts to a couple forums generated a little buzz, where a dozen or so happy iPad gamers took me up on my offer. They beta test the game and let me know what’s good/bad/broken before I release it to Apple; I send them free copies of the final version once it’s ready. A pretty sweet deal all around.

So, Ludum Dares (“Darers?”) — any iPad gamers among you care to lend me a hand with this thing? Information (plus more screenshots and updates) after the jump.

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4 more levels completed for the Fruits! casual game. Now only 4 remaining. Getting closer to release

Screenshots at: http://www.fruitsgame.net/4-more-levels-finished/

I was planning to make my first Android game for the October challenge, but I need more time for that.

So instead I’m now porting another old game to Flash: Zwarte Piet. So far, I’ve got the first level coming along nicely. It shouldn’t be too hard to finish this game, submit it to Mochiads and still make at least $1.00 before the end of October!

I’m not going to submit my app tomorrow, I’m going to work on it for the rest of the week. I’m on Half Term now so I can work on it for as long as I need. This will give the chance to add moving backgrounds and other things! I think I might only have one type of enemy in the first version though, but I’l more enemies after release. I’ve started a live stream so anyone can see how its going( http://www.ustream.tv/channel/attempting-to-make-a-indie-games ) and ask questions. You won’t see it running though because I’m testing it on my iPad.

-bear

EDIT:

http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/1994/ludumdare3.png

I spent a couple of hours on that. Ignore the water mark.

It has been a few days since I’ve last updated anyone on my project, and sadly to say not much has progressed.  As of yesterday I still did not have a car moving, or any gameplay.  I’ve been tied up with non-gamedev related work and tasks.  However there have been acouple of waster opportunities, placing me farther and farther behind schedule.  I can’t see it possible to have my project at Alpha complete by October 31st, however I will give it my best efforts to get it as close to that state as possible.

In other news, I have updated my splash screen, although I will need to update it once again for the final release as my logo will be changing again.  I received my wacom tablet last weekend, and it distracted me for several hours.  I am not an artist, but that certainly helps with my ability to get something concept wise.  Speaking of which, I started working on some concept screens.  This is the Race Setup Screen, although more information may be required later.

Concept of the Race Setup Screen.

Beyond fiddling with many parts besides gameplay, I have finally, just tonight, got the car moving!  The physics are by no means near complete, but a moving car is a huge step here.  Many pieces were required to get this far, and many more pieces are still required before I can actually say I have gameplay.  Unfortunately I work on non gamedev related things again this weekend, but I hope some miracles allow me to get laptime calculations and the ability to create replays.

As soon as I have a somewhat ready user-interface, and the gameplay near complete I will try creating some videos with gameplay footage that will likely blow your minds!  But until then, you will just have to wait.

It’s not often you come across a good “to the point” writeup about biz stuff (how many layers of SEO BS can we layer on this cake?). Here’s a recent one from Cliff Harris (Cliffski), developer of Gratuitous Space Battles (among other things).

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=884

(As for me, I’m finishing a contract that sneaked up on me… yarg, last time I do that again)

(cross-posted from Under The Bridge)

So let’s check the iTunes Connect reports and see what happened the first full day BallZOut was available, with our total “marketing” having been cross-posting to Ludum Dare, a tools post in the cocos2d forums, and a Touch Arcade post …

… well look at that, 48 sales for $32.51 income! Woo-hoo! October Challenge WIN! *does the happy troll dance* We’d thank you all by name, but you know who you are. Okay, we’ll thank Pat by name, for providing the most amusing testimonial so far:

It is without doubt, the best app I have bought for iPhone!

(since it’s the only app I have paid for

Thank you, Pat. Your entry into the App Store economy is duly noted.

Speaking of the App Store economy, examining just where these results place us in it is rather eye-opening. “Shocking” might not be overstating it, in fact. Taking a screenshot here of AppAnnie‘s rankings page as we write this:

Woah, dude. Thirty bucks and change of total sales actually gets your game on the charts? And into the top 1000 overall in Argentina? Clearly Argentinians (Argentines? Argentineans? Argentinos?) are discerning folk indeed — we’ll tip a bottle of Fuzion to them at our celebratory dinner — but that certainly seems to indicate an surprisingly low amount of overall sales, doesn’t it? Even if we just look at the U.S. where most sales come from, BallZOut was 265 in Puzzle games and 437 in Action games yesterday. And those are the two most heavily populated categories of games, by far. Can’t seem to quickly google up a running count of subcategory splits, but sufficiently enlightening metrics we can quickly get from 148apps.biz for the ‘Games’ overall category:

• Total active: 40,288
• Submissions this month: 1,744 ( 83 / day )

Yes, it seems like we can conclude pretty safely that the massively overwhelming majority of iDevice games are just not making any money, if you can be comfortably into the top 500 in your subcategories in the U.S. by pulling in just about enough to go out for lunch with. And unless you have a really killer and massively financed marketing plan, you would be extremely ill-advised indeed to consider writing an iPhone game to be anything other than an amusing hobby. Which, indeed, we did find frenziedly pounding out 1.0 to be; so we have every intention of continuing work on this project as our little playground to experiment with multiplayer Game Center support, features we haven’t tried out yet of the cocos2d engine, and so forth … but we’re certainly not going to shortchange paying projects to do so!

Just posted another update on Kobo II over at the Olofson Arcade:

Looks like I’m pulling in the old ZeeSpace after all. That is, structured/procedural/parametric graphics! You know, this sort of stuff:

I planned on just doing some placeholder graphics in GIMP for starters, but that’s just a big waste of time if it’s going to look anything but mediocre. With ZeeSpace terrain and models instead, I basically get instant nice looking graphics that is easy to scale and modify, and that can also be refined and polished to production quality later on. Also, as it’s structured graphics, there’s no need to worry about display resolutions; it’ll render razor sharp in any resolution – even on a 2560×1600 screen.[...]

Full story.

I didn’t want to tackle a brand-new game this month, so I decided to make a sequel for my Mini-LD game, Summit. I’ve been working on it pretty consistently this month, but hadn’t gotten around to posting anything about it.

Summit accomplished its goal: to make the player experience the fear of falling. But that was a stressful and often frustrating experience, so the game didn’t have much widespread appeal. With the sequel, I’m using the same engine to create an entirely different game. It’s something of a mix between Shadow of the Colossus and the Robot Wants series, having an emphasis on exploring, with a series of unique powerups allowing for further progression.

The game features a variety of regions, each with a unique atmosphere, level design and characters to interact with.

It is in its final stages of development now, and I’m working to finish up the artwork and details by the end of the month!

Well, not exactly up for sale just yet, but it is on flashgamelicense.com, waiting for approval so that it can be showed to sponsors. I hope it does well.

I want to thank all the people on #ludumdare who tested the game during development. A special thanks goes out to JDruid, who is responsible for the great music in the game, and did a lot of testing also.

Now, I wait.

Things are really cranking along now, which is good, because October’s almost over and my first-release deadline is almost here. I spent a good chunk of yesterday and today finishing up one of my last pre-release milestones, and as a result Distant Star now sports a functional, if somewhat limited, save slot system. You can access it via the in-game menu, which is another of those functional-but-terrifically-ugly systems (“Save!” “Load!” “Quit!”).

There aren't a lot of options just yet, but...

As part of the save/load system I also added a new game setup screen, where you can customize the game before starting. Right now it’s rather limited — there aren’t a lot of interesting customizations yet, ‘mfraid — but the interface is all there; it works and it looks pretty good.

Tomorrow and Friday I’m going to nail down the AI, and if I’m happy with the state of things I’m going to start passing the game out to beta testers over the weekend. Huzzah!

More screenshots after the jump:

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Hey Guys,

I just submitted my october ludum dare app to the apple iPhone app store monday morning and it got approved already! I ended up cutting some functionality so I could hope to get the game in the app store by the 31st. The game got accepted way sooner than I thought possible. So I wanted to ask you guys for advice.

Here’s a link, the rest of the post is a little confusing if you haven’t played it. It’s a simple side scrolling distance game a la “ninjump” and “monster dash” that’s astonomy based. http://itunes.apple.com/app/linr/id397913344?mt=8 It’s a free app so don’t worry about price. So if you have an iDevice feel free to check it out and leave any advice you have and I’ll try to get it in by the 31st!

To be honest I think the game is fun at first, some-what pretty with particles, then gets pretty boring. I tried to mix it up by adding achievements and a leaderboard but after a while it tends to get boring. I am currently thinking about adding multiplayer game center functionality but figured I’d ask what you guys thought first.

This is the first game that I’ve finished by myself and it’s entirely thanks to you guys. Read this post on reddit and read the blog posts here and my desire to finish something swelled. So for that I thank you. You guys are awesome.

(Cross-posted from: my own blog.)

Time for another installment of the developer diaries. When we last left our heroes, they had a plan: make an RPG, The Fae’s Wyrd, in a month. This is the part where the plan goes off the rails.
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